Tag Archives: Climate change

Environmentalists know that they don’t like Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general whom President-elect Donald Trump has tapped to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. But they don’t seem to know exactly why, based on the fact-free attacks being lobbed in his direction. Could it be that they’re simply mistaken?

Sure, Pruitt’s led the movement of states resisting the Obama-era EPA’s overreaches and challenging them in court. (In full disclosure, he brought us in to represent Oklahoma in its challenge to EPA carbon-emission rules.) But his point in those cases has always been that the EPA has to live within the limits of the law, including the constitutional prohibition on the federal government directing the states to do its bidding. So when EPA overstepped the line, Pruitt took it to court. A desire to see the agency follow the law isn’t exactly disqualifying for an EPA administrator.

It also doesn’t say much about how Pruitt regards the environment. He’s on record as arguing that conservatives should recognize the important role of the EPA in addressing pollution that flows across state lines, which is a uniquely federal problem. But that, he’s said, should be the EPA’s focus. Echoing the Clean Air Act itself, Pruitt’s view is that most pollution is the primary responsibility of states and local governments. Only they can understand and act on the trade-offs involved in environmental protection and have the flexibility to take into account local needs, rather than impose one-size-fits-all nationwide rules.

On that score, Pruitt has practiced what he preached. When Pruitt entered office in 2011, one of the most serious environmental problems facing Oklahoma was poultry runoff, mostly from Arkansas farms, fouling the waters of the Illinois River and Lake Tenkiller in the eastern part of the state. Oklahoma had brought a federal lawsuit against 14 poultry producers in 2005, and it took nearly five years for the case to be teed up for a decision, in 2010.

After waiting two more years for the court to act, Pruitt decided to take matters into his own hands and negotiate a solution directly with Arkansas. The states commissioned Baylor University researchers to study Oklahoma’s water-quality standards and worked together to reduce runoff through increased waste treatment and disposing of poultry waste outside of the river basin.

J. D. Strong, the former head of the Oklahoma Water Resources Board, specifically credits Pruitt with getting all the responsible parties “around the table” to make progress. During Pruitt’s tenure, Strong told Energy & Environment News, the state “made great strides when it comes to actual efforts to clean up scenic rivers in Oklahoma.”

Today, Lake Tenkiller has reclaimed its position as the “emerald jewel in Oklahoma’s crown of lakes” and is popular for fishing and watersports — a result that Pruitt, an avid fly-fisherman, has touted as a point of pride. Meanwhile, the federal court still hasn’t ruled on Oklahoma’s pollution lawsuit.

Pruitt’s record shows that he’s also serious about law enforcement, a core function of the EPA. Some environmentalists have tarred Pruitt as being in the pocket of the energy industry, but energy companies such as BP and ConocoPhillips that he has sued might have a different view of things. The state of Oklahoma accused those companies and others of “double-dipping” by billing the state for environmental-cleanup expenses for underground tanks that had already been paid for by insurance. One of those lawsuits was settled this past June, netting the state $2.8 million.

Pruitt’s record shows that he’s also serious about law enforcement, a core function of the EPA. The other talking point of Pruitt’s opponents is that he’s a climate change “denier,” but they never seem to be able to pin down anything he’s said or written denying the phenomenon — which is notable, given his leadership in opposing the Obama EPA’s climate-change regulations and many opportunities to express that view. What he has said is that “scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind.”

That same view is shared by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has acknowledged that future climate changes “cannot be precisely predicted” and that the mechanisms of climate change “are not yet completely understood.” Even the Obama EPA recognizes that scientists are still researching “how much Earth will warm, how quickly it will warm, and what the consequences of the warming will be.”

If Pruitt is asked at his confirmation hearing whether he believes in climate change resulting from human activity, we know that he’ll respond in the affirmative, based on his understanding of the science. But to his opponents, he’ll still be a “denier,” just because he opposes an unlawful and enormously expensive regulatory program that the EPA’s own model says won’t have any measurable impact on the climate. So much for following the science.

We suspect that environmentalists oppose Scott Pruitt not because of his views on the environment. Instead, they know that he’ll focus on the EPA’s nuts-and-bolts missions of enforcing the law and policing interstate pollution, while forgoing the grand, expensive, and often pointless gestures that have been the EPA’s hallmark under the current administration. That’s their problem.

But, for the rest of us, Pruitt will be a welcome breath of fresh air.

David B. Rivkin Jr., and Andrew Grossman practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington, D.C.

After Congress turned down President Obama ’s request to enact a law regulating power plants’ greenhouse-gas emissions, the Environmental Protection Agency turned to the states—not with a request, but with instructions to carry out the president’s energy policy. The EPA’s “Clean Power Plan” now faces the scrutiny of the nation’s chief regulatory review court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

If the Constitution’s federalism is to endure, the Clean Power Plan must be struck down.

The Constitution establishes a federal government of limited and enumerated powers while the states retain a plenary “police power,” subject only to the specific limitations of federal law. This is what Justice Anthony Kennedy called the Constitution’s “genius”: It “split the atom of sovereignty” to ensure accountability when meeting both local and national concerns, while fostering rivalry between the two levels to curb excessive political ambition that might threaten liberty.

Only in recent decades did politicians learn how to realize their ambitions through collusion. The federal government now entices states with transfer payments to establish and administer social-welfare programs. And, in schemes that the courts describe as “cooperative federalism,” it offers states the choice to regulate their citizens according to federal dictates, as an alternative to the feds regulating directly and having states get out of the way.

Even these approaches were not enough for the Obama administration to cajole the states to carry out its energy agenda. So it resolved to obliterate one of the last vestiges of the Constitution’s vertical separation of powers: the bar on federal commandeering of the states and their officials to carry out federal policy.

The Clean Power Plan is enormously complicated, but its overall approach is straightforward. Previous emissions regulations have focused on reducing emissions from particular facilities, but this one relies on shifting electricity generation from disfavored facilities (coal-fired power plants) to those the EPA prefers (natural gas and renewables). The EPA then determined what, in its view, is the maximum amount of such shifting that each of the nation’s regional electric grids could possibly accommodate and calculated the emissions reductions.

Parcel those figures out by state, factor in additional reductions due to estimated efficiency improvements at older plants, and the result is state-specific reduction targets. The states can elect to achieve those targets themselves—or, if they decline, the EPA will do it for them. “Textbook cooperative federalism,” says the EPA.

Not quite. Whether or not the states choose to implement the plan directly, it leaves them no choice but to carry out the EPA’s federal climate policy. That’s because the EPA can destroy but not create. It can regulate emissions of existing facilities, but it lacks the legal authority to facilitate the construction and integration of new power sources, which is ultimately the only way to achieve the plan’s aggressive targets.

That duty falls to the states, which the plan depends upon to carry out what the EPA calls their “responsibility to maintain a reliable electric system.” Doing nothing, as in the cooperative federalism scenario, is not an option.

So this is how the plan works: The EPA pushes coal-fired plants off the grid, and then counts on the states to ensure that the resulting reductions in capacity are matched by increases in EPA-preferred forms of power generation. State agencies will have to be involved in decommissioning coal-fired plants, addressing replacement capacity—like wind turbines and solar arrays—addressing transmission and integration issues, and undertaking all manner of related regulatory proceedings. All this to carry out federal policy.

The Clean Power Plan implicates every evil associated with unconstitutional commandeering. It dragoons states into administering federal law, irrespective of their citizens’ views. It destroys accountability, by directing the brunt of public disapproval for increased electricity costs and lost jobs onto state officials, when the federal government deserves the blame. And it subverts the horizontal separation of powers, by allowing the executive branch to act where Congress has refused to legislate.

One can only wonder what will be left of our constitutional order if the plan passes judicial muster.

The federal government would no longer be a government of limited powers, but instead be able to compel the states to do its bidding in any area. The states, in turn, would be reduced to puppets of a federal ventriloquist, carrying out the dirty work for which federal actors wish to avoid accountability. And the federal executive, in many instances, could effectively create new law by working through the states, free of the need to win over Congress.

So it is difficult to imagine a U.S. where the Clean Power Plan is the law of the land. It would not be the same country, or the same Constitution, that Americans have enjoyed all these years.

Messrs. Rivkin and Grossman practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington, D.C., and represent the State of Oklahoma and the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality in their challenge to the Clean Power Plan.

Some in Washington want to unleash government to harass heretics who don’t accept the ‘consensus.’

ByDAVID B. RIVKIN JR. and ANDREW M. GROSSMAN

March 23, 2016 6:29 p.m. in the Wall Street Journal

Galileo Galilei was tried in 1633 for spreading the heretical view that the Earth orbits the sun, convicted by the Roman Catholic Inquisition, and remained under house arrest until his death. Today’s inquisitors seek their quarry’s imprisonment and financial ruin. As the scientific case for a climate-change catastrophe wanes, proponents of big-ticket climate policies are increasingly focused on punishing dissent from an asserted “consensus” view that the only way to address global warming is to restructure society—how it harnesses and uses energy. That we might muddle through a couple degrees’ of global warming over decades or even centuries, without any major disruption, is the new heresy and must be suppressed.

The Climate Inquisition began with Michael Mann ’s 2012 lawsuit against critics of his “hockey stick” research—a holy text to climate alarmists. The suggestion that Prof. Mann’s famous diagram showing rapid recent warming was an artifact of his statistical methods, rather than an accurate representation of historical reality, was too much for the Penn State climatologist and his acolytes to bear.

Among their targets (and our client in his lawsuit) was the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank prominent for its skeptical viewpoint in climate-policy debates. Mr. Mann’s lawsuit seeks to put it, along with National Review magazine, out of business. Four years on, the courts are still pondering the First Amendment values at stake. In the meantime, the lawsuit has had its intended effect, fostering legal uncertainty that chills speech challenging the “consensus” view.

Mr. Mann’s lawsuit divided climate scientists—many of whom recognized that it threatened vital scientific debate—but the climate Inquisition was only getting started. The past year has witnessed even more heavy-handed attempts to enforce alarmist doctrine and stamp out dissent.

Assuming the mantle of Grand Inquisitor is Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.). Last spring he called on the Justice Department to bring charges against those behind a “coordinated strategy” to spread heterodox views on global warming, including the energy industry, trade associations, “conservative policy institutes” and scientists. Mr. Whitehouse, a former prosecutor, identified as a legal basis for charges that the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, the federal statute enacted to take down mafia organizations and drug cartels.

In September a group of 20 climate scientists wrote to President Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch encouraging them to heed Mr. Whitehouse and launch a RICO investigation targeting climate skeptics. This was necessary since, they claimed, America’s policy response to climate change was currently “insufficient,” because of dissenting views regarding the risks of climate change. Email correspondence subsequently obtained through public-records requests revealed that this letter was also coordinated by Mr. Whitehouse.

Reps. Ted Lieu (D., Calif.) and Mark DeSaulnier (D., Calif.) followed up with a formal request for the Justice Department to launch an investigation, specifically targeting Exxon Mobil for its funding of climate research and policy organizations skeptical of extreme warming claims. Attorney General Lynch announced in testimony this month that the matter had been referred to the FBI “to consider whether or not it meets the criteria for what we could take action on.” Similar investigations are already spearheaded by state attorneys general in California and New York.

Meanwhile, Mr. Whitehouse, joined by Sens. Edward Markey (D., Mass.) and Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.), sent letters to a hundred organizations—from private companies to policy institutes—demanding that they turn over information about funding and research relating to climate issues. In his response to the senators, Cato Institute President John Allison called the effort “an obvious attempt to chill research into and funding of public policy projects you don’t like.”

Intimidation is the point of these efforts. Individual scientists, think tanks and private businesses are no match for the vast powers that government officials determined to stifle dissent are able to wield. An onslaught of investigations—with the risk of lawsuits, prosecution and punishment—is more than most can afford to bear. As a practical reality, defending First Amendment rights in these circumstances requires the resources to take on the government and win—no matter the cost or how long it takes.

It also requires taking on the Climate Inquisition directly. Spurious government investigations, driven by the desire to suppress a particular viewpoint, constitute illegal retaliation against protected speech and, as such, can be checked by the courts, with money damages potentially available against the federal and state perpetrators. If anyone is going to be intimidated, it should be officials who are willing to abuse their powers to target speech with which they disagree.

That is why we are establishing the Free Speech in Science Project to defend the kind of open inquiry and debate that are central to scientific advancement and understanding. The project will fund legal advice and defense to those who need it, while executing an offense to turn the tables on abusive officials. Scientists, policy organizations and others should not have to fear that they will be the next victims of the Climate Inquisition—that they may face punishment and personal ruin for engaging in research and advocating their views.

The principle of the First Amendment, the Supreme Court recognized in Dennis v. United States (1951), is that “speech can rebut speech, propaganda will answer propaganda, free debate of ideas will result in the wisest governmental policies.” For that principle to prevail—in something less than the 350 years it took for the Catholic Church to acknowledge its mistake in persecuting Galileo—the inquisition of those breaking from the climate “consensus” must be stopped.

Paris is Copenhagen all over again — more presidential climate change grandstanding without concrete results.

The world is watching as diplomats in Paris hammer out the final details of a new climate agreement involving over 150 countries. The goal, said President Barack Obama, is “an agreement where … each nation has the confidence that other nations are meeting their commitments.”

But the world’s attention may be misplaced. There is no reason to believe that this agreement will conclude any differently from the last three, with nations reneging on commitments to drive down greenhouse gas emissions and to provide billions of dollars in foreign aid to finance reductions in the developing world.

That’s a big problem for the president: reciprocity has always been Congress’s chief concern when it comes to climate-related measures that threaten to drive up energy prices and sap the United States’ international competitiveness. The lack of binding commitments for developing nations like China and India is a big part of what killed consideration of one previous agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, in the Senate. And that, as well as general opposition to new greenhouse emissions regulations by congressional Republicans, presages the same result in Congress this time around.

Despite the messaging coming from the White House, as a legal matter, the president actually does need Congress’s support to complete any kind of meaningful deal. That legal reality is having serious consequences in Paris, where U.S. participation in the final deal is an overriding imperative. For one, it rules out any firm financial commitments. The Constitution, after all, assigns the power of the purse to Congress, and so the president cannot, on his own, set the U.S. foreign aid budget for years into the future.

Likewise, the president cannot unilaterally commit the US to binding emission-reduction targets. The Senate and executive branch have both understood for years that any “targets and timetables” for emissions must be put to a ratification vote. When the Senate ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, it extracted a promise from the George H.W. Bush administration to that effect. And when President Bill Clinton signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, it was failure to secure Senate ratification that blocked the U.S. from becoming a party and stopped it from becoming binding under U.S. law. In foreign-affairs law, these are extraordinarily strong precedent for the proposition that any binding reductions must be put to Congress.

The Obama administration’s solution to these seemingly intractable problems is to structure the deal as what it calls a “hybrid agreement.” Under this approach, only measures dealing with emissions reporting would be binding on parties. The rest would constitute what diplomats call “political commitments” — in other words, empty promises that are not legally enforceable. In short, the agreement will contain little in the way of substance.

That is not, however, how it will be touted to the American people. The administration, having identified the Paris agreement as a key plank of the president’s “climate legacy,” has sent a gaggle of senior officials to the negotiations and launched an all-out publicity barrage. The chief focus so far has been on the agreement’s longwinded aspirational language, including the likely-to-be-declared long-term goal of “decarbonisation of the global economy over the course of this century.” But that, like the other “commitments,” will have all the legal force of a fortune cookie message.

For those participating in the Paris talks, there should be a sense of déjà vu. The negotiations over the 2009 Copenhagen Accord marked the Obama administration’s climate-diplomacy debut, and the United States played a lead role in drafting the deal. Its key provisions? Aid payments to to developing nations and “quantified economy-wide emissions targets.” President Obama called it “meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough.” Structured to avoid the need for ratification, the accord was not legally enforceable and quickly came to be viewed, on its own terms, as a complete failure.

Next Tuesday, the Supreme Court hears American Electric Power v. Connecticut, a case that asks whether America’s climate change policy can be designed and managed by the federal courts. The answer should be a resounding no.

Hoping to force congressional action that would severely restrict greenhouse gas emissions, a series of lawsuits alleging “public nuisance” has been brought by various states, interest groups and activists. They claim that electric utilities and other large emitters of carbon dioxide have injured them by causing or contributing to global warming.

The case now before the Supreme Court was originally thrown out by a New York federal judge as presenting a quintessentially “political question” that only Congress and the president could properly resolve. Unfortunately, the lawsuit was revived on appeal. The judge who wrote that opinion later publicly admitted his hope that his ruling would hang as a “sword of Damocles” over Congress and the president, forcing them to act because of the obvious disruption to the U.S. economy caused by a lawsuit-by-lawsuit approach to climate change.

The Constitution does not permit judges to indulge their inner politician. Besides, there is a more fundamental reason why these lawsuits must be dismissed: Federal courts can only decide cases where the complaining parties have actually been injured by the defendants’ own actions and an effective remedy can be framed in a judicial order. It is, as Justice Kennedy wrote for the court in a case decided earlier this month, “[c]ontinued adherence to th[is] case-or-controversy requirement of [the Constitution’s] Article III [that] maintains the public’s confidence in an unelected but restrained Federal Judiciary.” Climate change nuisance suits fail this “case-or-controversy” test.

It is difficult to imagine a subject less susceptible to judicial resolution. Climate change is a well-established and natural phenomenon. The Earth’s climate has changed dramatically over time. In the 19th century, for example, the northern hemisphere began to emerge from a period of global cooling known as the Little Ice Age. The extent to which man-made emissions like carbon dioxide may contribute to this process of periodic change, and to more recent warming trends, remains unclear.

What is clear is that the entire human population produces carbon emissions, and industrialized economies have done so on a significant scale since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution more than two centuries ago. It is impossible to determine whether emissions by any particular power plant—or U.S. electricity production as a whole—have affected warming trends and, if so, how. Nor can we surmise what party is responsible in whole or in part for the particular plaintiffs’ alleged injuries. The law requires more than a guess.

Even if a court could somehow make this determination, it would be unable to formulate an effective judicial remedy. China became the world’s largest greenhouse gas generator in 2007, and the emissions of other major developing countries are growing rapidly. Were we to shut down the entire American economy, it’s not clear that it would reverse, or even stabilize, the warming process. In other words, a judicial ruling in these cases could never be anything more than a symbolic swipe at the problem, as the appellate court’s decision made clear. Again, our Constitution requires more.

The plaintiffs’ global warming public nuisance claims are very much square pegs in a round hole. Federal common law nuisance actions have been generally limited to cases where activities in one state, such as creating air or water pollution, have a direct and identifiable harmful impact in another state. The federal courts have stepped into such cases because the states have no other mechanism to resolve disputes that may be too limited in scope to warrant congressional action.

By contrast, no action by any of the targeted power companies in this case has polluted the air or water of the plaintiffs’ states. Rather, they claim that the companies’ additions to world-wide carbon dioxide levels have “contributed” to the process of global climate change. Under this simplistic logic, plaintiffs are themselves responsible for at least part of their alleged injuries, since each and every one has a “carbon footprint” that contributes some level of carbon emissions to the global total.

Most carbon-emitting activities make major contributions to economic growth and human civilization. There are no standards or emission caps created by the politically accountable branches of our government that courts can apply in determining which of these activities creates a “nuisance” and which does not. The rank absurdity of plaintiffs’ claims should be obvious to the justices, who should rule decisively that the federal courts do not possess constitutional jurisdiction over climate change cases.

Messrs. Rivkin and Casey served in the Justice Department during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush Administrations and have filed an amicus brief in American Electric Power v. Connecticut.